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Lineo Pays To License Real-Time Linux Capability

Posted by timothy on from the now-how-much-would-you-pay?- dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Embedded linux vendor Lineo has apparently caved in to Victor Yodaiken, and become the first software company to publicly announce the licensing of Yodaiken's patented process for running a general purpose operating system (such as Linux) as a task under a real-time kernel(such as RTLinux or RTAI)."

There's a special report at LinuxDevices which includes . . .

  • text of the Lineo press release
  • comments from Victor Yodaiken
  • news of a non-patented open source alternative ("Adeos")
  • a reference list about RTLinux and the RTLinux patent
  • a whitepaper about Adeos
There's an interesting quote where Yodaiken claims his patent will help open source."

7 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. I'm not seeing a problem here... by joshamania · · Score: 5, Informative

    Perhaps I'm wrong, but:

    This License governs the royalty-free use of the process defined by U.S. Patent No. 5,995,745. Anyone can license the use of the Patented Process by agreeing to be bound by the terms of this License. Such person is considered to be the Licensee ("Licensee"). The Patented Process may be used, without any payment of a royalty, with two (2) types of software. The first type is software that operates under the terms of a GPL (as defined later in this License). The second type is software operating under Finite State Machine Labs Open RTLinux (as defined below). As long as the Licensee complies with the terms and conditions of this License and, where applicable, with the terms of the GPL, the Licensee may continue to use the Patented Process without paying a royalty for its use. You may use the Patented Process with software other than the two types mentioned above but you must first obtain a separate license for such use. The first step is to contact Finite State Machine Labs (www.fsmlabs.com).

    That reads okay to me. Very similar to the GPL (in a sense). You don't have to pay unless you are charging people for it.

    1. Re:I'm not seeing a problem here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Just be glad that Yodaiken holds the patent and not Micro$oft. Then you'd have no way to use the software at all.

      I'm not sure you know Victor's intentions, so let me fill you in a little ...

      The RTLinux project on which Victor's patent is based was first implemented by Michael Barbanov as his master's thesis. Did we ever hear about Michael again? No, he's back in Russia and the patent doesn't even have his name on it. Why isn't Michael leading the project anymore ... why do we only hear about Victor now? ... go figure.

      This is an open-source project in the purest of open-source traditions, right? Wrong. All RTLinux's code is copyrighted by FSMLabs and if you came to contribute it is likely that they would integrate your code without proper attribution and it has happened in the past, including code taken from the kernel. Why? Because they need to be able to sell RTLinux's source code in closed-form and they can only do this if all of the code belongs to FSMLabs. Yes (if you didn't know about this) you can purchase the RTLinux source code in closed-form if you'd like. Yes, this is legal, but is it in the spirit of open-source, that's highly debatable?

      Victor first claimed that his patent was defensive, to protect himself against the evil empires who'd want to opress the OSS community. Yet, he later denied that he ever claimed that the patent was defensive. When pointed to previous RTLinux mailing list archives about his original statement, he didn't reply, but said archives have mysteriously become unavailable. Try accessing the January 2000 RTLinux mailing archives. Although all other archives are available, that one isn't. If it ever becomes available again, look at the January 27 posting by Victor, a copy of which can be found at LWN

      What this community needs to realize is that Victor is not who he claims to be. He is after the money, open-source is really a secondary worry.

  2. I love it. by BlenderHead-2001 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I really like the way this works. It prevents the co-opting of the abstract of the program for commercial use. For example the way IBM's early BIOS was clean-room reverse engineered to provide copyright-free alternatives. When it comes to GPL software I'd be happy to see a commercial entity have to pay to use the underlying idea of a program for commercial closed-source use while the GPL world get's to use it for free.

  3. Re:Hey, what about a sense of history here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Well, people were running RT-11 under RSX back around 1979. I also published MSX-11, a distributed MLS system, which had a variant that ran the MLS system as a network in a box, all running under RSX11D. (In that mode it was a test system.) That was published in DECUS #11-SP-6 back about 1979, in source. There are plenty of examples of running an OS under another OS, some even earlier than IBM's work. It was done on pdp8 way earlier, for example. Then too, VM/370 was a full virtual machine, not just os under os. Seems to me such an idea has so many prior implementations it would be tough to sustain, unless the patent is very specialized. As for hooking in realtime handling of various OS signals, that is very well covered in prior art.

  4. Re:Hey, what about a sense of history here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    AmigaDos did this too, if I remember correctly. It was a non-real-time OS running on top of the real-time Exec.

  5. Re:Not the only (or best) game on the market by plastik55 · · Score: 2, Informative
    As far as I understood it, MontaVista and FSM Labs aren't even in the same ballpark -- MontaVista's technology allows for running a normal Linux process with very low input/output latencies, on the order of a couple milliseconds. This is great for multimedia applications, particularly where you need immediade auditory-visual feedback from the user's actions without any perceptible delay, without doing a lot of OS-specific coding.

    RTLinux on the other hand is designed for hard real-time scheduling with microsecond latencies, but you have to write your programs for the RTLinux kernel (which runs Linux as a subprocess.) Which is great for industrial and scientific control/data acquisition applications, where you need to be guaranteed not to screw up the precise timing of your large deadly instrument, and can pay for custom programming.

    Or at least, that's how I thought the distinction went.

    --

    I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!

  6. Re:Hey, what about a sense of history here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I saw a presentation back in in 1997 of a company who provided a real time solution of running Windows NT as a process in a real time kernel completely comparable to the RTLinux solution. Forgot the name of the package and the name of the company. When did Yodaiken file this patent?